Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked Pentagon Papers, has cancer

Longtime anti-war and anti-nuclear activist Daniel Ellsberg, who famously revealed the top-secret Pentagon Papers detailing America’s long involvement in the Vietnam War, announced Thursday that he has been given mere months to live.

“On February 17, without much warning, I was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer on the basis of a CT scan and MRI,” Ellsberg, 91, said in a letter shared on Twitter. “I’m sorry to report to you that my doctors have given me three to six months to live.”

Ellsberg added that he will not undergo chemotherapy and will enter hospice care at the appropriate time.

While a Pentagon consultant employed by the RAND Corporation in the late-1960s, Ellsberg obtained a secret report commissioned by then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara that detailed US actions in southeast Asia since 1945.

The report revealed how US involvement in the war was built up steadily by political and military leaders who were overconfident about the prospects of victory and deceptive about their accomplishments against the Communist North Vietnamese.

“When I copied the Pentagon Papers in 1969, I had every reason to think I would be spending the rest of my life behind bars,” Ellsberg wrote of his decision to pass the report to New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan. “It was a fate I would gladly have accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as that seemed (and was).”

In June 1971, the Times published the first in a series of stories on the report. Then-President Richard Nixon’s Justice Department tried to quash the publication of the papers on national security grounds, but the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Nixon’s attempts at prior restraint violated the First Amendment.

Ellsberg, by this time working as a senior research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies, was also charged with theft, conspiracy and violations of the Espionage Act in connection with the leak — but the case was thrown out in 1973 after revelations emerged that Ellsberg’s conversations had been wiretapped and his psychiatrist’s office had been burglarized by members of Nixon’s notorious “Plumbers” unit.

Ellsberg said his unexpected reprieve allowed him “to spend the last fifty years with [wife] Patricia and my family, and with you, my friends.”

“What’s more, I was able to devote those years to doing everything I could think of to alert the world to the perils of nuclear war and wrongful interventions: lobbying, lecturing, writing and joining with others in acts of protest and non-violent resistance,” he said while noting that he hoped he could “report greater success for our efforts.”

Ellsberg suggested in his 2017 book “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner” that the world has never been closer to nuclear Armageddon.

His Twitter post similarly said the “current risk of nuclear war, over Ukraine, is as great as the world has ever seen” due to threats from Russia.

“Leadership in the US, Russia, other nuclear weapons states, NATO, and other US allies, have yet to recognize that such threats of initiating nuclear war—let alone the plans, deployments, and exercises meant to make them credible and more ready to be carried out—are and always have been immoral and insane: under any circumstances, for any ‘reasons,’ by anyone or anywhere,” he added.

The former military analyst also said the Pentagon’s “willful denial” on the matter is akin to America’s denial of “catastrophic climate change.”

Ellsberg told followers he was “happy to know” others had the “moral courage to carry on with these causes.”

With Post wires